


Diamonds and Hearts

by a_t_rain



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-07
Updated: 2015-09-07
Packaged: 2018-04-19 12:12:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4746056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_t_rain/pseuds/a_t_rain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alys and Simon take that seaside holiday, after <i>Memory</i>, and stumble across some amateur terrorists.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Diamonds and Hearts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [ExtraPenguin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ExtraPenguin/pseuds/ExtraPenguin) in the [Bujold_Ficathon_2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Bujold_Ficathon_2015) collection. 



> **Prompt:**
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> _Retirees Alys and Simon uncovering a plot against Barrayar and dealing with it on their own. Preferrably while channeling their inner Miles Vorkosigan._
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> I'm afraid this is not _much_ of a plot against Barrayar, and it may be more lighthearted than what you had in mind, but it was what came.
> 
> [Bujold Ficathon 2015](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/Bujold_Ficathon_2015/profile) has no deadlines and _lots_ of unclaimed prompts! And it's not too late to post a prompt of your own. Get on over there!

After their first few days on the south coast, the novelty of the boardwalk and the beachside bars had palled, and by mutual agreement, Alys and Simon sought out a quieter, less developed beach. It was rocky and windswept, not ideal for lying on the sand, but it had turned out to be abundant with wild-caught mussels. (The prudent first settlers had brought seed-stocks of various shellfish to Barrayar, and although not all of their experiments survived, most of the bivalves had flourished.)

They didn’t look like themselves, Alys thought: he sunburnt and in raggedy cutoff shorts, she wearing beach sandals, with her skirts tucked up.

“We could be a couple of old fisher-folk,” she said, “getting ready to bring our wares to the market.” They had been playing this game ever since they came here, imagining who they might have been if they were someone other than themselves. They were always very ordinary people in the game, and they had generally been married thirty years already.

“No, you couldn’t,” said Simon. “Any self-respecting shorewoman would have filled her basket a dozen times already, and been at the market hours ago.”

She ignored this intrusion of logic, and tugged at another cluster of mussels. “Haven’t we got enough for lunch yet?”

“Almost.” He tossed a few more mussels into the basket. “They’re not as big as they look on the outside, especially after you cook them.”

The wind was blowing off-shore, and something fluttered and landed in one of the little pools among the rocks. Alys saw that it was a playing card, an old-fashioned paper one that probably dated from the Time of Isolation. It was the queen of diamonds, but oddly, the two little diamond pips in the upper-right and lower-left corners of the card had been neatly cut out.

* * *

Alys wouldn’t have known what to do with the mussels – she had hardly ever cooked a meal in her life – but Simon did: a half-hour rinse in cold water in the kitchenette of their hotel room, and then some white wine and garlic. Alys made a salad, which was one thing she _did_ know how to do, and they sat down to lunch.

“These are excellent,” she said. “I didn’t know you could cook.”

“I can’t, not really. But this is a very simple recipe. My mother’s.”

She’d enjoyed introducing him to the theater and the ballet and the opera – all the things he hadn’t had time for, as chief of ImpSec, and hadn’t known about in his youth – but here, at this prole seaside resort, she found herself, unexpectedly, in _his_ world, and she was discovering he had all sorts of skills she hadn’t known about.

After lunch they made love at a leisurely pace, and Simon fell asleep afterwards. Alys tipped the last of the wine into her glass, and slipped out onto the balcony, very quietly, so as not to disturb him. They had made a pact that they wouldn’t allude in any way to the fact that he wasn’t completely well, but the truth was that he _wasn’t_ , and the doctors had said he ought to get as much rest as possible.

* * *

Simon joined her when he woke a couple of hours later, as she was checking the network feed on her reader. “Any news?”

“Count Vorrutyer’s died,” said Alys. “Poor man, he was only fifty.”

“Which one was he?”

“He was ... heavyset,” said Alys, which was the proper way to describe a morbidly obese person who happened to be a Count. “Rather ... eccentric. He didn’t get out much, especially after his last fiancée died in a lightflyer crash. There was an ImpSec investigation.” She restrained herself from saying _surely, surely you must remember that_ , since it was all too plain that he didn’t.

“Conclusion?”

“Accident, precipitated by bad weather.” She saw that Simon was still looking blank, and tried, rather desperately, “He always lined his hats with gold foil. To protect against mind control rays from space.”

“Oh! _That_ Count.” Simon’s face abruptly cleared, and then clouded again. “That reminds me, there’s something I ought to have told Guy Allegre about Vorrutyer. _Our_ Vorrutyer, I mean, not the late Count. It’s gone, now.”

There were _several_ things Allegre probably ought to know about Vorrutyer; Alys suggested half a dozen of them, but Simon kept shaking his head. “No. All of that would show up in his files. Whatever I meant to tell Allegre, it’s something that wouldn’t.” He looked up in sudden alarm. “Good Lord, he isn’t the _heir_ , is he? Because that would ... complicate matters.”

“No. Pierre didn’t name an heir.”

“And he isn’t the heir by primogeniture, or anything?” asked Simon, who would, a few months earlier, have been able to recite the entire Vorrutyer family tree off by heart.

“He’s not even close. The next heir is Pierre’s cousin Richars, and Richars has three young sons – or is it four? – and then after that there are Richars’s brothers Gerard and Yves, and Yves’s little boy, and _then_ Byerly’s father. So Byerly would be ninth or tenth in line, even if he weren’t disinherited.”

“ _That’s_ all right, then,” said Simon, apparently relieved. And then, apropos of God knew what unholy train of thought, “Vorrutyer wouldn’t kill a lot of children.”

Alys was not quite sure whether he intended to imply that Byerly might _not_ object to doing away with his father, or a few of his adult cousins, or even _one_ child if it happened to be a particularly obnoxious one – which Richars’s eldest boy _was_ , come to think of it. _She_ could not contemplate the prospect of Count Richars with any relief at all. One would have to _socialize_ with the man.

“How about a walk on the beach?” Simon suggested.

She set the reader aside. “I’d love to.”

* * *

They were walking along the shore when, to her astonishment, he dropped her hand, kicked his shoes off, and waded straight out into the sea.

“Simon,” she shouted, “your _holocube!_ ”

He took the holocube out of his pocket and threw it back to shore, just before plunging into the water. She leapt up and caught it. _Oh, right_ , she thought, as she stared numbly at the cube in her hands, _there are things more important than the holocube_. Was he losing his mind, after all, just when she had begun to relax and think that everything was going to be all right?

Simon was swimming out past the breakers. Something that looked like a bit of paper was bobbing on the surface of the water; he caught it gingerly in his fingers and held it out of the water as he swam back, one-handed. When he reached the shore, he showed it to her. Another old playing-card, disintegrating now that it had been in the water. It had been the seven of hearts, but now it looked like a piece of Swiss cheese, with every single pip neatly cut out.

Not mad, then. Onto _something_ , even if she didn’t understand what it was.

“ _Why_ would someone take the trouble to do that?” she asked. “What does it mean?”

“I don’t know,” said Simon. “And I don’t like it when I don’t know things.”

A couple of little lines appeared in his forehead, and she thought he probably had a private theory, one he didn’t want to disclose just yet.

“By the way,” he added with a grin, “nice catch, my lady. I didn’t know you could do that.”

“There were an odd number of boy cousins in my family. Sometimes they let me play ball with them, to even up the sides.”

“I expect you were good at it.”

“I was.”

“The wind’s been blowing from the northeast. I suggest we explore a bit in that direction.”

“What are we looking for?”

“More cards.”

* * *

An hour later they had found three more: the ten of diamonds in a drainage ditch, and the six and king of hearts blowing across a vacant lot. The pips had been neatly cut out of all three of them.

“It’s always seemed very fitting to me,” said Alys, “that the king of hearts appears to be stabbing himself in the head.”

“Why, my lady?”

“I don’t know. Love and death. I’ve always preferred to bet on diamonds, myself. They’re more reliable.”

“Here are some for you,” said Simon, plucking the four of diamonds out of a tree. “Now, what would you say are the odds of finding six red cards in a row and no black ones?”

“About the same as having six girls in a row, back in the days before reproductive technology. I had a great-aunt who did.”

“Yes,” said Simon, rather grimly. “It can happen. The question is, is it _likely?_ ”

“Not particularly. Are you going to tell me what you think is going on?”

“It appears to me,” said Simon, with the sort of coolness that only an old ImpSec man could attach to this particular statement, “that someone has been trying to make a bomb.”

“Out of _playing cards?_ ”

“There was a sort of urban legend when I was at school – how true it was, I don’t know – that you could make a bomb out of the red pips from old-style paper playing cards, alcohol, and hand lotion.”

“That was the sort of thing people talked about at your school?”

“I’m what they call a _Greekie hick_ , in case you hadn't noticed. We were _always_ dreaming up ways to blow things up.”

She could scarcely imagine Simon’s schoolmates talking freely in front of him about that sort of thing – but, of course, he hadn’t been _Simon Illyan_ then, not in the ways that mattered. As he was not – exactly – _Simon Illyan_ now. Even at sixty, he was round-faced and snub-nosed in a vaguely boyish way; she found it surprisingly easy to picture the boy he must have been.

“Would it work?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think any of my school-mates ever _tried_ it.”

“Hadn’t we better find out?”

* * *

“Wonderful thing, this planetary information network,” said Simon. “It doesn’t just tell you all the things you’ve forgotten, you can look up things you never knew at all.”

“Yes,” said Alys, trying to hide her amusement. Since losing his memory chip, Simon had discovered maps, note-taking, public libraries, holography, and the audio-recording button on his wristcom; it was only natural that the network would come next.

“It says that this particular urban legend can be traced back to _twentieth-century Earth_. Can you imagine? Also, that it might have worked with Earth playing cards, back when they were colored with something called _diazo dye_ , but that certainly wouldn’t be the case with Time of Isolation cards. They’re made with brillberry-skin ink, perfectly harmless.”

“That’s good. So we don’t have to worry about anybody blowing anything up.”

He shook his head, the lines deepening in his forehead. “When people are trying to blow something up, they don’t always give up after their first attempt fails. Quite the contrary, in my experience.”

“So – who? And what would anybody blow up around here?”

“Better start with the _who_. It’ll be easier, and when you know _who_ you can find out _what_. They’re rank amateurs, or they would have burnt the cards instead of ditching them somewhere they could be found. Trying to track down everyone who buys alcohol and hand lotion is a non-starter, but we might be able to trace an old-fashioned pack of playing cards. Not, perhaps, if they’re from someone’s attic, but it’s worth making a few inquiries at shops that might sell that sort of thing.”

* * *

There were two antique shops in town, and they got lucky at the second one. “I remember him, because I don’t usually get too many kids his age in here,” said the proprietor. “He was only about fourteen or fifteen, scruffy-looking, Greekie accent. I was thinking he was there to make trouble, but he turned out to be a legitimate customer. He left his comcode and asked me to call him if we got any more decks of cards like that one.”

“What did he look like?” asked Simon.

“What do they all look like, at that age? Spotty-faced and too skinny, although I guess he might be good-looking in a year or two. Brown hair.”

This was not very promising – it might be a description of almost any teenaged boy on Barrayar – but Alys took a pencil and notebook from her handbag and began to sketch, erasing and making changes whenever the shop owner directed her to do so. In her day, accomplished young ladies had all learned to draw. At last, after many false starts and corrections, the man said, “Yes, that looks a lot like him.”

“Here’s my comcode,” said Simon. “Call me at the same time you call him if you get any more of those cards, or if he comes in here again on his own.”

“Yes, sir,” said the proprietor, without bothering to ask who Simon was or what authority he had to give orders. Simon had simply _assumed_ he had the authority, because he’d always had it before, and the man had fallen into line.

* * *

“There’ll be a girl involved, too,” said Alys, when they were back at the hotel. “A Vor girl.”

“How do you know?”

In answer, Alys took her Vorfemme knife out of her handbag and used the tip of the blade to trace the outline of the king of hearts. The king fell away, neatly and precisely, leaving a large hole in the card shaped like his silhouette. “I don’t believe you can do that with any other sort of knife. And it might not be too difficult to cut out the diamond pips some other way, but not the hearts, not with those _curves_.”

* * *

Luckily, the town was small enough that they had a reasonable hope of locating their quarry by random chance. They spent that evening, and most of the following day, wandering around the places where teenaged couples seemed most likely to be found – the beach first, and then, when the weather turned cooler and it began to rain, several coffee shops and the game arcades on the boardwalk.

Simon accumulated a startling number of prizes in short order, including a toy owl coated in purple antigrav paint and equipped with a heat-seeking sensor. (Alys intended to pass it along to her cook’s grandchildren after they got back to Vorbarr Sultana – it would be _very much_ out of place in her penthouse – but for now, it bobbed contentedly along above their heads, hooting every now and then.)

“Perhaps,” she suggested after Simon presented her with yet another edible bracelet, “you might take a break from games intended for children. They don’t seem to pose an ... appropriate level of challenge for you.”

Simon agreed to this; however, the next arcade they visited had a roped-off section with an “ADULTS ONLY” sign, and the next thing she knew, he was putting a two-mark coin into a hot pink game machine labeled “BOX4SEX.” The machine was obviously a galactic import, designed by someone with an uncertain grasp of Barrayaran languages; luridly colored signs read “I’m horny let me play!” “Play for a sexy gift,” “You can play the the traditional boxing machine with the latest enhancements!” and, most alarmingly, “Warning! The not proper use of the game machine could cause serious accident! Use it on your own responsibility!”

A punching bag dropped down from the top of the machine; Simon knocked it back into place with a swing that was remarkably powerful for a man of his age and build; and a transparent prize capsule dropped down, containing a _particularly_ uncomfortable-looking article of lingerie, which he offered to her with great ceremony. Several teenagers, Alys noted, were looking on in fascination; unfortunately, none of them resembled their putative suspect.

“Simon, what I _meant_ is that maybe you should take a break from games altogether, and leave a few of the prizes for somebody else.”

“As you will, my lady. Shall we go to supper?”

* * *

They were sharing a platter of oysters at a restaurant with a beachside terrace when Simon said, “Excuse me, please,” climbed over the railing, and began strolling along the boardwalk with studied nonchalance. Alys didn’t even bother wondering whether he’d gone mad, this time; she waited a few minutes to make sure he hadn’t gone running off after a false lead, and then paid the bill.

She caught up with him on the pier at the far end of the beach; there were two strangers with him. As Alys approached, she saw that they were both teenagers, dressed in the unisex, imitation-galactic style that was so popular among certain types of young people at the moment: short jackets and tight black trousers made of synthetic materials, chin-length hair held back, in the girl’s case, by sable titanium clips. The girl also wore faux-Betan earrings, although Alys was fairly sure they didn’t match any of the actual Betan styles. The boy looked very much like the sketch she had produced with the shopkeeper’s assistance.

“ _Tell_ me,” Simon was saying, his voice low and urgent. Alys stationed herself about twenty feet away from him and leaned on the edge of the pier, pretending to watch the sunset; near enough to be a witness, and to discourage the young people in case they had any intention of pushing him off.

“We’re not planning to blow up _anything_ ,” said the boy, not very convincingly. “Who told you we were?”

“No one,” said Simon. “I figured it out through a fairly simple chain of deductions, and a bit of luck. And I must point out that almost anybody else could have done the same.”

“Are you with the municipal guards?” asked the girl. “Because you have to show us your badge, if you are.”

“No. Luckily for you, I am not.” Alys thought that she could see Simon grasping the full implications of the words _retired_ and _private citizen_ , at last. “I _will_ go to the guards, or possibly to Imperial Security, if you don’t tell me your target. I _may_ go to them in any case, but the chances that I won’t are higher if you decide to come clean.”

“Who _are_ you?”

“Simon Illyan,” said Simon.

The girl snorted. “And I’m the Empress-to-be Laisa.”

“ _Whoo?_ ” demanded a disembodied voice from somewhere overhead. It was, of course, the owl, but the girl started, gulped, and said, “Okay, not really. My name is Elynor Vorhavens.”

“I’m Theo Poros,” the boy volunteered, evidently unwilling to let his girlfriend assume all the risk. Alys decided that she approved of him, apart from the small matter of blowing things up.

“Do you have to tell my parents about him?” asked Elynor. “Because my mother would have _kittens_ if she knew I was dating a prole.”

 _So would mine_ , thought Alys, with a flash of irony, _but I don’t suppose it would be any use telling you to wait until your parents are dead and your son is grown up_.

“That depends on how this conversation goes, Mademoiselle Vorhavens. As I said, I am more interested in learning your target than your names.”

“What target?” said Elynor.

“That is what _I_ am asking _you_. Undoubtedly it will also be the first question the guards ask you.”

Theo looked down at the pier and muttered, “The-lightflyer-parking-deck-at-the-Imperial-Post-Office. But it didn’t work. Nothing happened when we tested it.”

If Simon was as flabbergasted by this answer as Alys was, he did a good job hiding it.

“We were going to do it at night,” added Elynor quickly, “so nobody would be hurt.”

“... Except, of course, the mechanics – did you know they generally work at night? And any poor post-pilot who returned late from his mail run. And the security guards, assuming they hadn’t already caught you in the act – which they probably would, since they are professionals and you are _very much_ amateurs.” Simon paused a moment to let this sink in, and then asked, in the same deadly-calm voice as before, “Exactly what did you think you were trying to achieve?”

“Um,” said Elynor. “Democracy? Like the Betans?”

“And by what _mechanism_ did you imagine that blowing up the lightflyer parking deck at the Imperial Post Office was going to accomplish that?”

“It’s – Imperial. Like the name says.” Theo was obviously floundering.

“That is a fact. It does not, however, make setting a bomb off at the Post Office a reasonable mechanism for achieving democracy. It _does_ mean that any attack on the Post Office, or the property of the Post Office, would legally be regarded as treason. I leave it to you to decide whether you think being executed for treason would be worthwhile for what would appear, by your account, to be an attack on a purely symbolic target.” He turned to Theo, who was clearly the less resolute of the two. “ _You_ would get a nice, quick, clean death. One of the perks of not being Vor. Your girlfriend, however, would be left to starve to death in the Great Square. Is that what you want for her?”

Theo had gone white, and mumbled, “No. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Evidently not.”

Watching Simon demolish him was, Alys thought, a bit like watching someone melt a bar of chocolate with a plasma arc. It was riveting, in a rather uncomfortable way, but she thought it was time she stepped in – especially since Elynor showed no signs of melting. It wasn’t that she disapproved of Simon’s methods, exactly – Theo fully deserved what he was getting – but she thought she recognized Elynor’s type; the girl would respond to anything she perceived as bullying by turning twice as stubborn and defiant.

She stepped out of the shadows. “Excuse me, but I couldn’t help overhearing some of what you were saying – is there a problem here?”

“No,” muttered Theo.

“No,” said Simon.

“Yes,” said Elynor, having recovered her composure. “There are _all kinds_ of problems here. Archaic and unjust social institutions, for a start, and also blind worship of the military, _plus_ the fact that we apparently live in a surveillance state...” (she glared at Simon) “... plus the fact that most people are _indifferent_ to all that as long as they can afford a beach holiday and a new ground-car.”

“My dear,” said Alys, “I do see your point, but if you want to change society, the results tend to be more lasting – and less bloody – if you do it from the inside.”

“That’s what _all_ old people say,” said Elynor, “but they’ve had, like, _forever_ to try changing things from the inside, and it hasn’t _happened_ yet.”

_Oh, child, you’ve got no idea what our world was like thirty years ago._

“Anyway, I don’t _care_ if they condemn me,” Elynor went on, with the passionate conviction of someone for whom _starving to death in the Great Square_ was still an abstract concept. “If it’s the _right thing_ – and if it gets people’s attention – I don’t mind _dying_ for it.”

“You might not, actually,” said Alys, with deceptive gentleness. “You’re a minor, and a girl at that. I don’t know exactly what would happen – there hasn’t been a test case in our present Emperor’s reign – but with the laws as they are now, you do realize that it’s more likely than not that it would be your _father_ who would die for it.”

Elynor went _beyond_ white. _Green_.

“Yes. Archaic and unjust, as you said. But _not_ the sort of law you can readily change by sacrificing a life to it.” She looked the girl over. “Obtaining a law degree, I think, would be a necessary first step. As it happens, I know of an organization that sponsors scholarships for young women. May I give them your contact information?”

* * *

“I don’t think,” said Alys, “that we’ll be hearing much from either of them for quite some time.”

“No,” said Simon. “Especially now that we know where she lives. Nicely done, that bit about the scholarships.”

“It wasn’t a ruse. Well, not _only_ a ruse. I think she’d do well. She's got brains, even if she isn't using them at the moment, and the right sort of instincts.”

“How did you know to say _that_ to her? About her father?”

“Fathers and daughters. It’s ... something special. Not always, but often. And, when she said her _mother_ would have kittens if she knew she was dating a prole, that implied that her father _wouldn’t_. Of course he might be dead, or out of the picture, but I thought not. Someone willing to indulge her taste for galactic styles had to be buying her gifts, since the boy would never have been able to afford those hair clips. So I thought it worth the gamble.”

“Ah. I fear I haven’t had much experience dealing with teenaged girls. It’s a _good_ thing I haven’t, of course, but I have to admit I was somewhat at a loss. Boys, now ... well, I remember what an idiot _I_ was at that age, and that’s a starting point, at any rate.”

She couldn’t imagine Simon ever having been an idiot, but she nodded and said, “Girls aren’t so very different, you know.”

“I suppose we’re not going to report anything about this?”

“I don’t think either of us is under any obligation. You’re retired, and I’ve never been on the payroll, officially.”

“Yes,” said Simon. “This business of being a private citizen ... it’s growing on me.” He leaned on one of the posts and looked out over the sea, the wind ruffling his hair; Alys thought that he had just discovered how radically free he had become, and wondered if the world was ready for him. “By the way, I’ve just remembered what I meant to tell Guy Allegre about Vorrutyer. If it’s a question of clearing someone who might be innocent and falsely accused – he’s probably the best operative we have, and if you set him on it, he’ll never give up until he finds out the truth. But he isn’t always as ... assiduous about hunting down the _guilty_.”

“I don’t think you can warn General Allegre about that _now_ ,” said Alys. “It would be hypocrisy.”

“Quite. He’ll have to discover it for himself.” A contented expression spread over Simon’s face, no doubt occasioned by the thought of Vorrutyer being Somebody Else’s Problem.

“Out of curiosity, Simon, what _are_ your politics?”

“I ... don’t think I know, my lady. I’ve never been permitted to have any.” He turned away from the sea, took her arm in his, and smiled. “I’m looking forward to finding out.”

**Author's Note:**

> The "hearts and diamonds bomb" is described in William Poundstone's [Big Secrets](http://www.amazon.com/Big-Secrets-William-Poundstone/dp/0688048307), which was one of my favorite books when I was Elynor and Theo's age.
> 
> The Box4Sex boxing game machine is real. I totally couldn't make that up.


End file.
